Blog:Vietnam review skewed?

Critics of the US monitoring programme on apparel imports from Vietnam argue that it’s unjustified, and having seen some of the numbers quoted by the Department of Commerce I must agree they don’t seem to stack up.

Of the 486 tariff lines covered by the monitoring programme, there was no trade at all from Vietnam in 317 of them. Significantly, of the remaining tariff lines, many had rising unit values, indicating that prices from Vietnam have increased since it joined the World Trade Organization in January - the complete antithesis of the dumping argument.

Trends in unit values and import levels were then compared with other suppliers of these products to the US, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, DR-CAFTA (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua), the Philippines, Malaysia, Macau and Cambodia.

And after all this, it was concluded that there was insufficient evidence of dumping to self-initiate an investigation.

The process will take place twice more over the next year. But the question many US importers and retailers want answered is why this wasn’t an opportunity for the Commerce Department to cancel the apparel monitoring programme altogether, or at the very least remove many of these products from the programme?

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